August 28, 2007
A Word from Rosie Little
“I could get all writerly about it, and call it an ‘aqualine nose’, but to do so would be to confine its owner for all time to the pages of fiction, for how could I ever expect you to believe that he truly existed were I to plonk such a literary phenomenon squarely in the middle of his face? An actual nose– a nose of flesh and bone and cartilege– might in be be aqualine in profile, but it is a strange fact of life that it is almost never so described unless the describer has a pen in her hand or a keyboard beneath her fingertips”– Danielle Wood, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls
August 26, 2007
Please walk on the grass
Take a Canadian, a Brit, and a Japanese girl– all homesick for Hyogo, and throw them into Toronto. To Korea Town, the Annex, the University, Yorkville, Chinatown, Kensington, and home again. Feed with sushi, crepes a go go, good coffee, and then DIY okonomiyaki for dinner once we’re home again– oishi desu! Sunday afternoon on Toronto Island, and walking on the grass. Home once again, and tonight there’s a bbq, topped off by very Canadian Portuguese tarts.
I am now reading Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, and why aren’t you?
August 26, 2007
Itadekimasu
“What does it mean exactly, itadekimasu?” I asked Sayaka over our sushi lunch yesterday– the Japanese equivalent of “let’s eat”, or “Bon appetit”. She explained that it means “I will take your life,” and it was a message of thanks to the food we were about to eat. Grace, I suppose, without a god. I think Barbara Kingsolver would approve (I think Barbara Kingsolver may have replaced Jesus in our household). And I love it. I will stop italicizing itadekimasu, and it will enter my vernacular. As non-religious people, we have to seek to live our lives in thoughtful ways, and I think this is a good tradition to take along with us.
August 24, 2007
Grace Paley
Thank you to Steven W. Beattie for informing me of the death of Grace Paley at the age of 84. As Steven says, everybody has a story about her and I am no exception, though my story is not so personal. I’ve told it before, but it’s worth repeating.
From Wednesday, April 12, 2006:
I want to write a bit about Grace Paley. I first learned of her through this post at Maud Newton. She came into my life next at the beginning of March when I was shelving her Collected Stories at the library. I took the book home with me that night (what a wonderful job it is to be handed books all day, I must say) and absolutely fell in love with her work, and, through it, with the short story itself. And now I’ve finished her collected non-fiction book Just As I Thought, which has left me awfully enamoured of the woman herself. After fifty years as a anti-war, pacifist, anti-nuke, feminist activist, I think Grace Paley would be quite right to look back on it all and say, “I was right all along.” Though what she was right about, I don’t imagine would bring her great joy.
In Just As I Thought, Paley recounts her years in the peace movement, the women’s movement, and also as a writer. “The Illegal Days” is an excellent piece on abortion. But my favourite piece in the book was “Imagining the Present”, in which she writes about imagination in the same way that so many writers look upon the novel as a means to empathy. Paley sees imagination as a tremendously potent force. She writes:
First of all, we need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there’s a certain political view that you mustn’t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. Of course it’s very hard for anyone to know who their exact people are, anyway. But that’s limiting. The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of the imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.
August 24, 2007
Yes
No one has ever made as much sense as Heather Mallick in her latest column Worshipping at the Alter of Cheap. “We should buy goods as sturdy as we can afford, but fewer of them. Instead, middle-class homes are packed with plastic toys made in China, brightly painted and without aesthetic charm, not that kids care. Kids are pulled around in wagons that look like plastic turquoise dugongs. Wooden wagons with red metal trim have real style. But they are more expensive. The fact that they are beautiful, will last longer and can be handed on to other children and to those sensible and praiseworthy secondhand toy shops does not matter. You chose the plastic blob. You worship the god of Cheap.”
August 24, 2007
Footprints
Oh, I do wonder. About my houseguest who comes from a culture in which bathing is a sacred ritual. Who comes from a culture in which the body is scrubbed clean before one steps into the bath water. Oh, I do wonder. About my houseguest. About what she must have thought this morning. What must she have thought about the footprints in my tub?
August 23, 2007
Shoes off in the house
The arrival of Sayaka, our Japanese houseguest (via Vancouver), has put me back in mind of those little cultural quirks we all possess and would never even notice were it not for someone different to reflect them back to us. Sayaka has been kind enough to keep my reflections to herself today, but I’ve been reminded of back when Stuart and I first met, and I would tell him to just leave his shoes at the door when he came over. And of course I’d take off my shoes when I went to his house, and it was only when his demonic landlady finally blew her top that I realized that my behaviour was considered strange. Not only was she fed up with tripping over my shoes inside her door, but she thought that I took them off in the first place was just bizarre. Stuart admitted he did find it a bit weird when I made him deshoe at my place, but as it was one of a million things he found a bit weird about me, he hadn’t mentioned it. But yeah, now that I mentioned it– English people don’t take off their shoes in their houses!! It never even occurred to me, and I think it’s only a Canadian thing due to climate. Let me tell you though, when we moved to Japan I definitely felt a little cultural affinity. And shoes-off-in-the-house was the only authentically Canadian ritual I could think of that didn’t involve donuts or ice, which was sort of novel.
August 22, 2007
Author interview
The fabulous Deanna McFadden has an interview with Janice Kulyk Keefer up here at CBC Words at Large. And you know, it’s not yet too late to still make The Ladies Lending Library a summer read. I started the season out with it (oh, and where has the time gone), and it was wonderful. You will gather as much from Deanna’s interview.
August 22, 2007
On cheap paperbacks
My copy of The Blind Assassin is a mass-market paperback. And though I don’t remember reading it the first time, surprisingly I do remember buying it– that little burst of joy upon realizing here was a whole book for 11.99 and, moreover, I could afford that. The book is wonderful this time around, by the way, but I am also taking particular joy in its mass-market paperbackness. It’s the first such book I’ve read in a long time, and I’d forgotten how satisfying its little bulk can be. Bulk, yes, but fits so conveniently into my bag. I like the way the spine cracks whether I want it to or not, and so the book can’t help but come to be lived in. The Blind Assassin in particular lends itself to this form, I think, in that the novel within the novel is inevitably paperback. The cover design is perfect too, with the gold embossed letters suggesting the sordidness and drama of the story, all the while spelling out “Margaret Atwood”. Which, actually, is exactly right.
